Highlights

Ouroboros, 2014 - 2024 by Ben Sanderson

The exhibition consists of several wall-like works that are composed together to create temporary rooms within the gallery. The walls are created by reusing old paintings in various states: primed and painted, dyed, cropped and quilted back together again, pulped and pressed into rag paper. They have a more deliberate ‘front’ and a more accidental ‘back’, each playing a role in two different spaces. They hold smaller paintings, embedded and framed, a process that has involved sifting, sorting and reactivating a decade of old work.

‘The fronts are where most of my energy goes. Top-stitched and carefully placed blocks of colour fall into pattern, often punctuated by smaller paintings. Paintings have gone back to their material nature. The selected ones are pruned and arranged within their borders, walls of collaged thought’.

‘The backs are the closest I have got to a fully improvised way of working; they surprise me every time. It’s like crawling through a hedge. They hold all the waste subconscious thoughts. They are the bits I don’t want to see or the bits I don’t know what to do with. Often the fronts are trying to clear space in my mind or create less in the room, but the backs aren’t planned for. The blank areas on the front are often found on the backs of old paintings. It’s getting a bit confusing now, as the fronts are often made from old backs and the backs are made from old fronts’.

Forma Retorta 1, 2023 - 2024 by Stephen Towns

Mixed Media Sculpture
100 x 52 x 42cms

The Ruins of Fiction, 2022 - 2023 by Siana Serres

The Vampire Squid from Hell (Vampyroteuthis Infernalis) is a mysterious species inhabiting the bathypelagic, or midnight, zone.
Rarely seen, it is surrounded by legends and speculation. Believed to be one of the earliest species to diverge from our evolutionary branch, its perception, intelligence, and means of communication remain foreign to us. Each cell of its skin gathers information about what it touches, and each cell also communicates with its surroundings. It has evolved as an apparent alien from us, a paradoxical entity, who lives with ‘the world on its skin ’.

The nest of the Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, a creature from the depths who has risen to the surface, offers a fleeting glimpse into its otherworldly existence. Through water and its haunting, ethereal chants, the nest evokes its ephemerality. Fragile, the nest resists becoming an imposed object, instead embodying a temporary act of resistance—celebrating fluidity and movement.

One can enter and sit with the sounds, smells, and colours reminiscent of the squid, like entering the ribcage of a ghostly creature. A string of smoke is pouring from the basin, and disappears before leaving the nest. Outside, a gelatinous blue form stands on copper legs—a ghostly remnant of the squid’s materialized body, which melted shortly after taking this finite, corporeal shape.

Juxtaposing Louis Bec’s drawings with the nest brings up questioning around authority.
Despite being spoof, their visual language, materi- al, and their appartenance to a scientific institute ground their influence. Those finite qualities are not compatible with the fluidity of the nested creature it wishes to encapsulate, leaving behind it a gelati- nous corpse and relics.

untitled, 2024 by Ollie Daniels

Sculpture physicalising the use of the soles of the feet in dance.

100 x 100cm